


Dépaysement

by SharpestScalpel



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-03
Updated: 2011-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-22 04:02:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestScalpel/pseuds/SharpestScalpel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dépaysement

Jim wouldn't know homesickness if it walked up to him in a bar in a short skirt and gave him a goddamn lap dance. Their captain was, McCoy often thought, ricocheting around the galaxy looking for home.

But McCoy knew what home was. Knew what it had been to know a place and love it, to smell a place's smells, taste a place's tastes, and feel that one was where one was meant to be.

He had loved Atlanta - all shining sprawl and confusing tangle of roads (too many named Peachtree for anyone but a native to ever figure out, city planners had to have been drunk to keep that name in the rotation). He had loved riding the rickety trains - relics of crude public transportation designed in the 20th century. And further out, where he'd grown up away from the city, all hills and humidity, well, that was just how the world was supposed to be. Too-bright sun and sweat that didn't dry until October.

The divorce had shattered him; it was the final blow that had shaken him loose and sent him spinning off into a void - the literal void of space. And he hadn't been back, not once in the years since. Shore leave seemed too short a time, too cruel, just enough to dip his toe in a refreshing pond and no chance to shuck his clothes so he could dive in.

But McCoy carried Georgia with him just as much as Chekov was a little piece of Russia in the middle of nowhere. Just as much as Scotty still had Aberdeen soil on his bootsoles. Hell, even Keenser had that faraway look in his little beady eyes sometimes, and McCoy knew he wasn't really there on the Enterprise so much as he was back in his homeland, where ever the hell that might be, feeling the familiar light of a place that knew him in return.

"Spock, hey, Spock, wait up a second." McCoy quickened his pace just enough to match the Vulcan's unaltered strides. "Dammit, man, I know you hear me with those ears of yours."

McCoy almost crashed into the other man when Spock stopped abruptly, still graceful as ever. "Doctor, I am uncertain why you would accost me in the corridor in this fashion. Have you not met your daily quota for abusing my heritage?"

The doctor winced. Spock was an asshole; that was still no excuse - there was just something about him that brought out the worst in McCoy's tongue. "Listen up, hobgoblin, I'm trying to invite you to join some of us for a drink."

Not the most gracious invitation he'd ever issued and Spock's raised eyebrow certainly seemed to agree with McCoy's own assessment he'd not made the prospect sound pleasant.

"Hang on, let me start over." McCoy put the flat of his palm to the swell of bicep in Spock's upper arm and squeezed for a quick moment, an unthinking gesture, a physical request for Spock's patience. "Some of us get together for drinks every now and then, some of us who're, well, you might say we're homesick. And I figured, you know, you might like to join us tonight."

They got together to drink, but that was just an excuse. They got together to share stories. To feel closer to their homes across the deep blackness of the light years between them. And Spock...

McCoy hadn't gone back to Georgia. But it was still there, glinting and waving in the breeze, waiting for him.

Spock was still, tense under McCoy's hand but he did not pull away from it. "An... interesting invitation, Doctor McCoy."

It wasn't a refusal.

"It's disorienting, ain't it? Not being where your feet know what the ground feels like..." McCoy trailed off, uncomfortable. It made him feel too open, too soft in vulnerable places, to talk about the way he opened his eyes every morning and still thought he was in his Grandmother's barn.

But Spock wouldn't get to go back, wouldn't ever wind up where he'd been meaning to go even though he hadn't been paying attention in quite the same way again. And McCoy couldn't abide thinking of the man sitting alone, too far from a home that he couldn't go back to ever again.

It would have made sense for Spock to declare the whole thing illogical. McCoy was braced for it, dropped his hand so he wouldn't have to pretend not to be hurt when Spock mocked him in that subtle, logical way. Spock's actual response almost didn't register he was so ready to make his exit - this had been a mistake.

"Forward me the meeting information, Doctor. I would... be gratified to join you."

"What? Um, yeah, I'll do that." McCoy blinked but managed a jerky nod at least. "Yeah. See you then."

McCoy watched Spock turn and continue his walk down the corridor, back to his quarters. But the Vulcan's shoulders seemed less rigid to McCoy's careful eye, his footsteps less lost and alone.


End file.
